After all the recent rain, many of us have probably encountered the insects at the heart of this week’s poem, Suzanne Langlois’s “Blood Meal.” This poem deftly conjures the special torment of being swarmed by mosquitoes, and I also love its allusions to humanity’s own blood-letting, as well as the perfect zing of its ending.

Langlois’s chapbook “Bright Glint Gone” won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s Maine Chapbook Series award. Her poems have recently appeared in Whiskey Tit, Rust + Moth, Cider Press Review and Menacing Hedge. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches high school English in Falmouth.

Blood Meal

By Suzanne Langlois

A swarm of mosquitoes engulfs me
at dusk, their hunger a halo buzzing
around my skull, the most disorganized
phalanx ever to come for anyone’s blood.
Mosquitoes have killed more humans
than humans have, which is impressive,
as killing humans seems to be what
we do best. I have nightmares of being
attacked by a hoard of warriors trained
by mosquitoes; maenads howling to
bathe their young in someone’s blood.
The whining buzz next to my ear is both
taunt and target. The smear of blood
left when I manage to kill one
is always my own.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Blood Meal,” copyright © 2019 by Suzanne Langlois, appears by permission of the author.

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